The Flying Trilobite Blog

The 3rd Annual #SciArt Tweet Storm starts on March 1st! A whole week of hundreds of artists tweeting art inspired by science with the #SciArt hashtag. The Symbiartic crew (Kalliopi Monoyios, Katie McKissick, and myself) will be retweeting a ton of them from the @Symbiartic account.

In addition, something I'm super excited about: the new symbiartic.com will be launching several hours after I post this. Check it out for some more news. We're launching something I hope will be a huge help to science communication - editors, bloggers, journalists, and of course artists or call kinds; cartoonists, fine artists, scientific illustrators, bioartists and more. Don't miss it.

On a more personal note, I am working on a portrait for a scientist (and friend!) I admire. More on that pretty soon.

AND! This here purty ol' Flying Trilobite blog turns 10 years old on the tail end of the #SciArt Tweet Storm! Watch for a contest announcement and a chance to win an original painting.

(Gotta get started making the painting you can win! Add that to my to-do list...)

When searching for full-time work, it can be a challenge to remember what drives you forward. In my case, every career advancement I've had in the past 10 years, from speaking engagements, to professional writing, to social media management, stems from sharing my art on The Flying Trilobite blog, and experimenting with ways to build the sciart community. I'll have more to say on the actual blogiversary, but for now, thank you to everyone who encourages my work. Professionally I'm in a tough transition right now, and your support means an incredible amount to me.

As hostility towards art mounts, we may have to learn to accept the ephemeral. Call it a coping mechanism, dammit.

Let’s jump right in and learn how to destroy the irreplaceable fruits of human creativity and hard-won skill.

How to Destroy Watercolours

Often the simplest way to destroy watercolours is to simply do nothing. Wood pulp contains acids generated by the enzyme lignin that will over time, cause paper to yellow, become somewhat fuzzy on the surface and easily torn. If you want to speed up the process, simply turn on the lights. It’ll help the lignin break down faster, so it yellows and deteriorates even faster.

Not a watercolour, but my favourite book of art criticism. D.G. Rossetti from The Langham Series of Monographs, published in 1906. You can see the yellowing acutely: every time I read its pages in the light, I’m hastening its demise.

The way lignin acidifies and destroys paper was only really identified in the 1930s, so there are plenty of old watercolours you can get rid of. These days watercolour paper comes in multiple levels of quality, the way most art materials do, and they range from papers bathed in a pH-neutral solution to counteract the acids, to ones with the lignin removed altogether. And while tradition methods of fire, ripping and tearing, and being trampled by horses will destroy a watercolour, if you yearn for the yellowy, brittle acidic old days, all you need to do is take some cheap newsprint paper and tuck the watercolour firmly into its folds. The acid from the newsprint will soak into the archival watercolour and begin its demise. For best result, change the newsprint every so often and keep it in the light.

How to Destroy Oil Paintings

Oil paintings are painted on canvas, and again, in some cases the best idea is to let the materials destroy themselves. Before 20th century chemistry, raw cotton or linen canvas was coated with a glue size to protect the surface from moisture. The most common glue size is rabbit-skin glue, a smelly and horrible substance, as I discovered when I had to double-boil some for an art history of materials class. After the rabbit skin glue is applied, some of it was mixed with calcium carbonate to create gesso, the common fine art primer. (Modern jars of acrylic based “gesso” are gesso the way “processed cheese food” is cheese.)

So the cool thing about all this rabbit skin glue if you want to destroy classic oil paintings: it is reactive to humidity. This is why art galleries maintain meticulous climates inside. The rabbit skin glue can expand and contract with humidity levels. Oh oh oh! and so can the wooden support the canvas is stretched on! All that wood to warp, and expanding and contracting glue will cause the oil paintings to crack right the hell up, from fine spiderweb-like wrinkles to vast chasms crosscrossing the portrait or landscape. So take an oil painting into a sauna, then a desert. In the same week.

If you’d instead like to destroy an oil painting and leave a personally incriminating mark on it as well (you cheeky bastard), simply press your thumb or finger into the oil surface. Even with varnishes, the natural oils and acids in your touch can slowly cause your fingerprint to appear, ruining the painting.

Of course with oil paintings there also the whole oil-is-flammable thing. The vegetable oils and turpentine they’re made with are ripe for lighting up. As what seems to have happened to the stolen paintings from the Rotterdam Kunsthal museum in 2012 when thieves took these paintings:

All images of the stolen Rotterdam Kunsthal paintings were distributed by police and are considered open source. Copied from Spiegel Online.

The technique for destroying these works of art is more complicated but not really. First, you are smart enough to plan an art heist that baffles police, but dumb enough to steal priceless works of art you have no hope of selling due to their notoriety. Then, after a year or so, let your mother burn them all in an oven. From Spiegel Online:

Six Romanians have been charged with the theft, and are currently awaiting trial. Olga Dogaru, the mother of one of the accused, told Romanian TV last week that she had incinerated the paintings in a stove after the arrest of her son. The thieves had been unable to find buyers for the works and she was worried about being discovered, she said. Forensic specialists have since inspected the stove and found evidence of “painting primer, the remains of canvas and paint,” Ernest Oberlander-Tarnoveanu, director of Romania’s National History Museum, told the Associated Press.

Michaelangelo’s Pietà is a major work for many reasons, including that no one had ever depicted Mary and her son in this pose before. Typically, Christ was laying across the ground with his head in his mother’s lap. Michaelangelo played with senses of scale to evoke a mother cradling her baby: if Mary were to stand up she would be a massive giant despite her delicate and youthful head. In 1972, a disturbed geologist shouted “I am Jesus Christ” and attacked the massive Pietà with a hammer, managing to knock off a number of marble pieces, many of which were taken and never returned, including Mary’s nose. (It was later re-sculpted out of a portion removed from the back of the statue.)

The taller of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, before and after destruction. From Wikimedia, photos by A. Lezine and Carl Montgomery.

Carved into a cliff face along the Silk Road in Afghanistan in the 6th century, these caught the ire of the Taliban who decided, “the statues were against Islam”. In the late 1990’s, holes were drilled into their faces for dynamite. This actually parallels a Christian practice of transforming pagan Roman temples into churches, and one of the acts was typically to behead or deface (literally ruin the face) of statues of Roman deities, often burying them under the new Church’s foundation.

In March 2001, the Buddhas of Bamiyan were blown up, despite international protest and an offer from India to remove them to that country.

March 21, 2001, the Buddhas were blown up by the Taliban. Image from Wikimedia, originally from CNN.

Art that Destroys Itself

Some art is created to decay, to evoke feelings of impermanence and dissolution. The destroyers are ultimately artists in the post-modern tradition who prefer their work to be fleeting. Andy Goldsworthy for example often works with objects found in nature such as icicles, pine cones, clay and coloured earth and bright autumn leaves, sculpting their forms into elaborate, not-quite natural structures. If you haven’t seen his film Rivers and Tides, you owe it to yourself as a human being.

Image still from Andy Goldsworthy: A Collaboration with Nature film. Used under Fair Use. Purchase on Amazon, you won’t regret it.

Want to Preserve Some Illustration?

Okay. So that was somehow both enraging and cathartic. I hate to see beautiful and provocative art destroyed without the agency of the artist.

If you do too, and would like to preserve some medical art, I strongly recommend donating to the Vesalius Trust. Medical and life science illustrators can will their work to the Trust after they die for preservation (there is no provision for digital work at the moment). When I met members of the Vesalius Trust at the AMI meeting in Toronto in 2012, I can confirm that they are absolutely passionate about the preservation of artwork. They cannot however, intervene to save artwork being mauled and destroyed by criminal acts. They’re almost super heroes, but not quite.

I've been repeating variations of this quote every day for the past couple of weeks for personal reasons. It's from The Martian, directed by Ridley Scott, screenplay by Drew Goddard, starring Matt Damon as astronaut-botanist Mark Watney.

Solve one problem, solve the next.

Shared it on Twitter, and maybe some other people will find it useful today.

Been repeating parts of this to myself a lot the past few weeks, for personal reasons. From the movie, "The Martian". pic.twitter.com/MyOyavacBN

Here are my public speaking tips when speaking to a roomful of artists who are better than you. Okay, first let's define "better".

I have an Honours Bachelor of Fine Arts, and tend to paint dead ocean critters with ridiculous wings on them.

I have spoken to artist groups such as Association of Medical Illustrators and Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, many of whom have graduated from programs like the Biomedical Communications Graduate program at the University of Toronto and know what the thing at the back of your throat is called and how to draw it in cross section as well as animate it wiggling when you sing karaoke. Scientific illustrators create artwork that can save lives, inspire conservation efforts, and visualize trips to space. This post is based on a presentation I gave in front of life-saving medical illustrators. So that's what I mean by "better".

1. Be willing to laugh at yourself. Poke a bit of fun at your own work. Although I think wielding the power of evocative visual metaphors is one of the highest intellectual pursuits of humankind, I have to admit painting wings on trilobites is pretty weird. Hopefully this disarms any audience naysayers who wonder what you are doing there and makes discussing your work easier for others. If you don't treat your own paintings as precious, highly-evolved concepts above the likes of normal mortals, you are easier for people to relate to. For some reason.

I almost didn't include the hashtag info here. It felt like I was putting too much text on the slide.

2. Don't read from the slides. Slides should be visuals to illustrate your points, not where you keep your points. <--SERIOUSLY, THAT'S THE MOST IMPORTANT TIP ON HERE. This talk was only 20 minutes, so there was a lot of ground to cover. I included this slide (above) near the end as one I could quickly whip through if my time was almost done, or I could linger on if my talk still had extra time due to drinking 5 coffees that morning and talking like a squirrel.

Talkin' Twitter at the Association of Medical Illustrators. Thanks to Julie Saunders for the photo!

3. Share useful tools. There's a tendency in artists and illustrators to want to always maintain some professional mystique, to keep the aura of Why You Are So Great a bit of a mystery so that no one replicates your success. We all need to fight that and share techniques with each other. During this presentation, I shared why I think Twitter is a great tool for nuanced, complicated arguments by using what's know as the "Twitter essay" (increasingly misidentified as a "tweet storm" these days, whatevs).

Oh, and in case you're wondering about how to write a Twitter essay without looking like a noob:

The Twitter Essay: keep replying to each of your own sequential tweets (delete your @name), and use 1/m, 2/n until you are finished. Then, when someones sees 32/n retweeted into their feed, they can click on it and see the whole thread.

4. Don't be creepy. You want to share enough about yourself to show how everyone's professional journey is similar, but each has unique twists and turns in the story. But if you throw random personal stories out there without a point, it can come off creepy. That's why I never tell anyone my "broken zipper at a friend's wedding" story. It goes nowhere. Always bring it back around to the work and your drive for why you do what you do.

5. Open doors. When I talk about Symbiartic, I talk about the things that I feel are important to the #sciart community. Copyright and attribution issues. Respect for illustrators as effective science communicators alongside journalists. The power of banding together on issues that matter. Sharing art techniques and ideas. When I speak to professional scientific illustrators, I hope to convince them to get out of their studio-and-peers bubble a bit and share more of their work and expertise with the wider world of science communication. Insight should be shared.

Giving any sort of talk to artists and illustrators should be a call to action, a call to communicate. It's not just self-promotion, it's about participating in a wider community.

The old Symbiartic blog banner started out as oil on slate. Tough to photograph, fun to scan. I have no patience and scanned it wet.

As an oil painter for the past 20+ years who used to manage at a fine art supply store and notably not a chemist, I’ll do my best to explain. Don’t slip on the floor, and remember to soak your cleaning rags in water before disposing of them in the metal bin. They can spontaneously combust, you see.

Introduction to what paint is and isn’t

All fine art paints share a few properties that make them different from say, dyes. Paints are essentially pigment particles bound in a sticky, transparent medium, whereas dyes or soluble in liquid. So oil paints are pigment bound in oil, acrylic paints are pigments bound in acrylic polymer medium, and watercolours are pigments bound in a water-soluble medium called gum arabic. Fabric dye and fabric paint are therefore not the same thing.

There can be other agents inside a tube of paint these days, that slow down or speed up drying, that lend texture, or help stubborn pigments bind to the medium. (Inexpensive paints often have too much binder in them and can cause discolouration over time — check out this post by artist Jonathan Linton on his blog Theory and Practice for some empirical tests.) But at their root, all paints are pigment+medium.

Quick History Lesson

Within Western Art History, oils overtook fresco painting and egg tempera painting in popularity relatively quickly. The Master of Flemaille is sometimes credited with beginning the practice of using oil paint for fine art purposes, though more often the credit is erroneously given to the Van Eyckbrothers. In reality, craftspeople and artisans were already using oil for some time previously. We also now know that oil paints were in existence even earlier in Asia, thanks to paintings found behind statues blown up by the Taliban at Bamiyan.

The superior qualities of oil make it easy to understand why it took over from other mediums. Fresco, such as Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling, are essentially pigment bound in plaster. You had to mix just enough of the correct colours for one “go” or “pass” at a section, and estimate how much detail you could achieve with it before it dried before your eyes. So something like the subtle blending of God’s robes or tones and shadows of Adam’s skin in The Creation of Adamhad to be estimated in multiple swatches, each with its paint mixed just before application. A difficult task. Oil paint on the other hand, may not fully dry for weeks: you can play with it, correct its tones and even erase missteps from the canvas and start again on a section. Blending becomes open for experimentation.

Types of Oil

Even in the Renaissance when oils first inspired artists to delve wholeheartedly as a medium, a number of oils were tried as vehicles for pigments. And their properties differ.

Linseed Oil — made from flax, linseed is the most popular due to its flexibility and resistance to cracking. It does have a strong tendency to yellow with age, however.

Walnut Oil, Poppy Oil and Safflower Oil — much less likely to yellow, these thin, clear watery oils are much more prone to cracking.

With these different properties, how do they come into play when actually painting? Well one of the Ninja Turtle Old Masters had it right: analysis of Raphael’s The Mond Crucifixion (1502–3) shows that the ground, figures and green robes were painted using linseed, and the blue sky painted with nut oil. This way, the yellowing of the figures and ground were an acceptable trade-off due to their subject, but the blue sky was considered better off being cracked and bright blue than yellowed and smooth. Painting below:

The Mond Crucifixion by Raphael uses two types of oil on different elements to preserve colour and paint film. And the effect still lasts after 500 years, eh?

Watching Paint “Dry”

Watercolour and acrylic paints have water as part of their medium — they dry by evaporation. But oil paints don’t. They dry by what’s called a siccative quality. That is they absorb oxygen from the air. This has the undescriptive definition of:

(Chemistry / Elements & Compounds) a substance added to a liquid to promote drying: used in paints and some medicines [from Late Latin siccātīvus, from Latin siccāre to dry up, from siccus dry]

Essentially, oils have a rate of autooxidation from the air, they absorb oxygen and harden. I’ve often described this as putting Jell-o into an enclosed container and adding tons of pineapple chunks to it: the oil is the Jell-o and the air is the pineapple — you can only add so much to the enclosed bowl and it will stop jiggling. Perhaps I haven’t got this analogy quite right. But now I want Jell-o.

As oils harden, there’s an interesting problem: oxygen is absorbed through the paint surface, meaning if the paint is very thick, you can see a different “drying” rate on the paint’s film than on the first layer’s applied on the canvas. The surface could be hard and the oils underneath still squishy like yummy lemon Jell-o. (Warning: oils processed as art supplies are not cleared for human consumption.)

Fat Over Lean

One of the main appealing properties of oil painting are the glazes. By adding a small amount of pigment to the relatively clear oil medium, you can very subtly tint an image. This is called glazing. Most Renaissance Old Masters (think the Ninja Turtles and their peeps — Artemisia Gentileschi not April O’Neil) used a toned underpainting and then built up several of these thin glazes of colour on top to create astonishingly realistic figures and scenes. The translucence of the paint film allows for sophisticated ranges of flesh tones. But then we hit the problem of the upper layers of oil glazes drying before the lower (first) ones do — and this is where cracking comes from.

Okay, another analogy: imagine the top (newest) layer of oil is stretching as it dries out hardens, and it stretches to the max. Its surface is expanding because it is absorbing oxygen (not evaporating water). Now, they oxygen eventually begins to hit the layer below. And it stretches and expands to the max. But they layer above is already dry, how can it expand any more with the one below pulling it!? >crack<

Like a big cookie on a pan. Slide an uncooked cookie under a cooked cookie, a bigger one and stretch and heat up that dough: as the bottom cookie dries and expands its surface, it will crack the smaller cookie it is now stretching on its surface. >crack< Nomnomnom.

To get around this, painters developed the Fat Over Lean rule. With each layer of glaze, add an increased amount of oil paint to the layer. (Less pigment, more oil.) This way, the rate of oxygen begin absorbed by an oily (fat) top layer will be slower than the hidden lower, less oily (lean) layers, and hopefully they will saturate with oxygen and harden at approximately the same time.

This leads to other tricks and techniques too. If you use too little oil in an early glaze, it can obliterate the drawing or painting underneath that you want to show through all the thin transparent glazes. It also can make the paint too pasty and thick, which is unworkable for fine detail. So, in the early, lower glazes, sometimes solvents such as turpentines are added. The loosen the paint, disprese the pigment particles, and then kindly evaporate in a big hurry leaving the old that’s left to be covered by another turp+pigment+oil layer that has a little less turp and a little more oil. And so on.

To answer the question above about the dandelion salad, oils themselves are not harmful (though not processed to be safe for food). An open container of say, safflower oil on the table will do no more harm to breathe in than some extra-virgin olive oil with Balsamic vinegar and a few chili flakes on your table for bread. It’s the solvents you have to be especially wary of. Even some of the odorless ones have harmful vapors, although it’s possible nowadays to buy non-toxic alternatives. I’d be happy to recommend some I’ve tried if anyone has email requests (this is not an infomercial).

Patron Saint of Pigments

In Renaissance Italy, the patron saint of painters was St Luke — who was also the patron saint of doctors. Painters didn’t have a Guild of their own, they belonged to the same as doctors. Why? Besides the mythology of the saint himself, it was for the practical reason of painters and doctors both frequenting apothecaries for medicinal and artistic ingredients.

The pigments in oil glazes add another property and challenge to the artist who up until about 150 years ago, had to mix each batch of paint by hand. The pigment particles are not all the same size, and do not all disperse at the same rate within the oil medium. What this means is some colours will have more oil, and others less. Yeah you see it coming: the glazes following the fat over lean rule are best applied in certain orders to reduce cracking upon hardening.

As an example, let’s say you’re painting a red rose, with all it’s subtle shadows and highlights. To get ideal results in your glazes, you may want to apply the glazes in this order: manganese blue, cadmium red, quinacradone red, alizarin crimson. Mostly this will not matter to modern oil painters, but it can still have an effect even today. Most true alizarin crimsons will have up to twice as much oil content as a lead-based white.

Bouncing light

What’s the point in all these complicated glazes? Just to mix colour? Not just — they add luminosity to the painting. You see, when light enters the hardened oil paint film, it passes through several distinct layers of mostly transparent paint. And sometimes, before being reflected back out to the surface, it bounces off of one of the colourful pigments, and back down to the layers below, and then out. Sometimes it will bounce on the boundaries of the separate glazes before bouncing out to meet your eye. And this is what gives oil paintings their glow and their deep deep blacks. The dancing behaviour of the light in the complicated multiple layers and their colour pigments.

Here you can see the light beams (blue) bouncing multiple times through the oil layers, off oil membranes and off the colourful pigments. This bouncing gives oil paintings their luminous glow.

The New Oil

Consider this little afterword the start of another conversation for another day.

Oil painting gave artists the tools necessary to create images that can be corrected easily due to their long drying times and that seem to glow due to their layers. As an oil painter myself, these are highly prized qualities. And the last several years, we’re seeing another technology that prizes these same qualities of easy correction and luminosity. Digital painting has exploded in popularity with programs like ArtRage (used to create the simple image above), Photoshop, Corel Painter, and the shareware Gimp. Ctrl-z is the new solvent, and pixels the new luminous colours. And I don’t think it’s an accident. What would pioneers like The Master of Flemaille or the Jan Van Eyck have done with current technology?

If they’re like me, they’d want to experiment with the ease of the new tools but still stick their fingers in the sticky paint, smell the soft odor of the oil, and play with their pigments.

I’m not a chemist — I could be wrong. Feel free to offer corrections and tips of your own in the comments. When this post was originally published in 2011, some lively discussion ensued in the comments on both Symbiarticand Lines and Colorsand I think they’re worth checking out.

After celebrating 9 years of blogging on The Flying Trilobite, I’m going to get all old guard and pompous and established and drop some wisdom about best practices for science artists online.

Show off. Saying “I am too busy making art to spend time online” means you are too busy making art no one will see. Visual art is a performance art.

Yes I said before coffee. Start making art before you even have coffee in the morning. Get up an hour early and do art before you go to your day job. You’ll spend the rest of the day with your creative muscles buzzing because you gave them a workout and that feels good.

Make pie. Don’t do the hyper-competitive thing and only talk about yourself and your own work all the time. It’s tempting, I know: we’re all trying to make it, and live the dream of full time art-making all day. But doing that will cause you to miss out on the camaraderie of community with other science artists. Promote other people too. Remember: you are not giving away your piece of the pie by retweeting someone else’s art: you are making a bigger pie for the potential audience to feast on.

Sell your very soul. Don’t try to separate art from artist. More than ever, artists are a part of their art. Your online presence will award you contracts not only on your talent, but also your personality.

Get with the times. Used to be that things were centralized around The Blog and comment sections were lively places. That’s not the case anymore. People read the link on Twitter or Facebook when you share it, and then comment on that social media platform instead. It may be a little messier, but skipping the latest-greatest social media platform means missing out on those conversations about your work.

Have an art avatar. Update your blog once a week, but put some art up every day on Twitter. Remind people that you are talented and not just amazingly Twitter-witty.

Get on Twitter. So you have a blog and you have Twitter ( both non-negotiable in my opinion.) You may want to sign up for a lot of social media sites to try them out, but pick two more and focus on building an audience and business with them. Artstation? Instagram? Periscope? Vine?

Spending money to make money is a lie. Go cheap when you start out. Use free blog software to build a portfolio. Skip joining professional illustrator groups and find community in Google Hangouts and industry hashtag discussions. Spending time to make connections is the truth.

Proudly Google yourself. Learn how to use Google Search by Image and Tineye to monitor how your work is being used by other people. You need to be proactive in protecting your work.

You’re scared, I know. Let people share as much of your art as you can. Sharing ≠ stealing.

I’m telling you to work harder. Crowdfunding, selling on Etsy or print-to-order like Redbubble all offer the potential to take some of the burden off of working 2 jobs and making art in the wee hours. So treat it seriously. Have a plan and be professional.

Oh that ol’ thing? Chances are you’re building new connections all the time. Dust off your older artwork and share it again for a fresh batch of eyes.

Winning. Remember that as science artists, our feeds are filled with the very best of the internet: exciting scientific discoveries and delightful, disturbing, intriguing art. We are creating sciart utopia. We win.